Development of Cellphone-type Tele-operated Android
Takashi Minato
minato@atr.jp

Shuichi Nishio
Kohei Ogawa
Hiroshi Ishiguro
nishio@ieee.org
ogawa@atr.jp ishiguro@sys.es.osaka-u.ac.jp
ATR Hirosi Ishiguro Lab. and JST CREST
2-2-2 Hikaridai, Keihanna Science City, Kyoto, 619-0288 Japan

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a newly developed portable human-likerobotic avatar “Elfoid” which can be a novel communication
medium in that a user can talk with another person in a remotelocation in such a way that they feel each other’s presence.
It is designed to convey individuals’ presence using voice,human-like appearance, and touch. Thanks to its cellphonecapability, it can be used at anytime, anywhere. The paper
describes the design concept of Elfoid and argues researchissues on this communication medium.
Author Keywords

Communication media; minimal design; human’s presence.
ACM Classification Keywords

H.5.m. Information Interfaces and Presentation (e.g. HCI):
MiscellaneousGeneral Terms

Human Factors; Design.
INTRODUCTION

Current advanced technologies of communication media allow us to connect with distant people in various modalities.
The progress of the communication technologies may reflect
people’s aspiration to have natural communication (like faceto-face talk) with distant people. The current communication
media rely on visual and sound information; however, morehuman-like interface is expected to bring more natural communication.
One approach to make a natural tele-communication is toconvey individuals’ presence to remote locations. If people
can feel each other’s presence in the tele-communications,they can talk in a face-to-face-like manner. One idea is toendow communication media with a human-like shape. The
android “Geminoid” [1] is one of such a medium, which

Figure 1.
“Elfoid”

The prototype of cellphone-type tele-operated android

closely resembles an actual person and can reproduce person’s speech and motions. It works as a robotic communication medium by operating it from a remote place. The important finding in this study is that a person operating Geminoid
feels its body is his/her own body and another person facing
the operated Geminoid also feels it is possessed by the operator, that is, the operator’s presence can be transferred. However, Geminoid is not an easy-to-use medium like cellphonesbecause of less portability. A portable (cellphone-size) Geminoid is desirable, but it is hard to implement a realistic humanlike shape, numbers of actuators to provide human-like motions, and various sensors in a small body. A minimal designof the shape and motions to convey human’s presence is necessary to develop a portable presence-transmitting medium.
The tele-operated android “Telenoid” has been developed
based on the minimal design of humans [2]. It has a simplified human shape, holdable body, several actuators to express
some human-like gestural motions. Ogawa et al. [2] have reported that people prefer communication with Telenoid rather
than cellphones. Based on the same concept, we have developed “Elfoid” (Figure 1) as a portable tele-operated android.
It has also simplified human shape and is designed to transfer
a speaker’s voice (and motions in the future) using the cellphone networks and talk to other person in the fashion shownin Figure 1.
Some studies have tried to transmit individuals’ presence using tele-operated robots (e.g., [3]). Our study differs fromthe existing studies in that we focus on exploring minimum
requirements to transmit individuals’ presence.
THE CONCEPT OF THE DEVELOPMENT OF ELFOID

The concept of Elfoid is that anyone can transfer his/her presence to a remote place at anytime, anywhere.
Anytime, anywhere
Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
APCHI’12, August 28–31, 2012, Matsue-city, Shimane, Japan.

A small 3G cellphone unit is embedded (Figure 2), and people can talk with other people in remote places in the sameApprox. 20cm

SpeakerInterface button
Cellular phone chip

Shopping mall

Elderly facility

MicrophoneFigure 2. The details of internal mechanism

Elementary school

Figure 3. The example scenes of experiments with Telenoid

manner as cellphones. The prototype can register one telephone number in the memory, and users can call the number
by pushing a button on the chest of Elfoid. Elfoid also has
own telephone number and can receive a phone call.
AnyoneThe shape is designed as easily recognizable at first glance tobe nothing but a human, capable of being interpreted equally
as male or female, old or young, that is, neutral human shape.
The completely symmetrical face provides neutral gender.
Mixing the child-like body proportion with the adult-like face
proportion results in age-free appearance. These features enable it to be an avatar of anyone, differing from Geminoid
which closely resembles the original person.
Transferring individuals’ presence

Ogawa et al. [2] have reported that the holdability of Telenoid contributes conveyance of individuals’ presence (thatis, physical (tactile) interaction with the communication media is important) through the experiments with Telenoid.
Elfoid has soft, pleasant-to-touch exterior and transfers individuals’ presence not only by voice and human-like appearance but human-like tactile impression.
RESEARCH ISSUES
System development

The first prototype of Elfoid shown in Figure 2 does not haveactuators. It is difficult to embed numbers of actuators due toits small size; therefore, the future work needs to explore theminimum degrees of freedom of motoin to transfer individuals’ presence. The alternative way to express the speaker’s(operator’s) motion in Elfoid is to use light, sound, and vibration. We are trying to produce visual illusory motion ofElfoid by blinking a number of LED embedded in the body.
When people use Elfoid in the manner of right figure in Figure 1, Elfoid of the speaker-side needs sensors to measure thespeaker’s motion in order to express his/her motion in Elfoidof the listener-side. The first prototype does not have sensors,
and the future work explores which sensors is necessary totransfer human’s presence.
System evaluation

Elfoid is designed to transfer human’s presence, and we needto verify that it can actually transfer the presence through experiments. Here, an important issue is to establish a methodto evaluate whether users feel other’s presence or not. The
future work explores a measurement of presence based on

the user’s behaviors, brain activities, and physiological responses. We will test that the user can feel the speaker’s presence in Elfoid while exploring essential factors or minimum
requirements to transmit human’s presence.
We will also try to reveal the impact of Elfoid by investigating how people adapt the communication with Elfoid
and how people’s communication style is changed by Elfoid
through social experiments. This study uses Telenoid as well
as Elfoid, whose design is similar to Elfoid. Our researchgroup already have conducted experiments to evaluate people’s impression on Telenoid and people’s adaptation to Telenoid in shopping malls, facilities for the elderly, and elementary schools [2] (Figure 3). These experiments have revealed that people quickly adapt conversation with Telenoid
and are impressed by its shape and tactile feeling, and same
results are expected on Elfoid.
CONCLUSION

This paper presented a novel robotic communication medium“Elfoid” which provides new communication style in which
a user can talk with another person while feeling each other’s
presence. The developmental concept of Elfoid and its prototype were shown and research issues on Elfoid were discussed. It can be a powerful communication tool beyond
the existing cellphones. For example, aged persons can intimately connect with their children or grandchildren living in
distant places by using Elfoid, and it is supposed to provide asense of ease in their daily life. We will have a demonstrationof Elfoid at the poster session.
REFERENCES

1. Nishio, S., Ishiguro, H., and Hagita, N. Geminoid:
Teleoperated android of an existing person. In Humanoid
Robots, New Developments, A. C. de Pina Filho, Ed.
I-Tech Education and Publishing, 2007, 343–352.
2. Ogawa, K., Nishio, S., Koda, K., Balistreri, G., Watanabe,T., and Ishiguro, H. Exploring the natural reaction ofyoung and aged person with telenoid in a real world.
Journal of Advanced Computational Intelligence andIntelligent Informatics 15, 5 (2011), 592–597.
3. Sekiguchi, D., Inami, M., and Tachi, S. Robotphone: Ruifor interpersonal communication. In Proceeding ofComputer Human Interaction on Conference ExtendedAbstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems(2001), 277–278.